School of Medicine

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Bio
Prior to a career in medicine, Dr. Chang was an English major and subsequent novelist at night. During the days, he taught literature part-time at Rutgers University, and for extra money, worked in a laboratory in NYC washing test tubes. Inspired by his laboratory mentor, he began volunteering at the hospital next door, and developed a love for interacting with patients. Through this experience, he saw how caring for others could form deep bonds between people - even strangers - and connect us in a way that brings grandeur to ordinary life.

In addition to seeing patients, Dr. Chang is a physician-scientist devoted to advancing the field of cardiovascular medicine. His research has been focused on identifying a new genetic organism that better models human heart disease than the mouse. For this purpose, he has been studying the mouse lemur, the smallest non-human primate, performing cardiovascular phenotyping (vital signs, ECG, echocardiogram) on lemurs both in-bred (in France) and in the wild (in Madagascar) to try to identify mutant cardiac traits that may be heritable - and in the process, characterize the first high-throughput primate model of human cardiac disease.